There Will Be Blood

• 1. Introduction

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  There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American epic period drama written, directed and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It closes with a boast about a milkshake: "I drink your milkshake!" The line sounds absurd in a film about drilling for oil. Its history turns out to be stranger than the line itself. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a man on a ruthless quest for wealth during the Californian oil boom. Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciarán Hinds and Dillon Freasier round out the principal cast. Where did that line really come from? How did this film come together, and why do people still argue about where it ranks?

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• 2. Plainview's Rise

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  In 1898, Daniel Plainview finds silver while prospecting in New Mexico, and he breaks his leg in the same pit. He drags himself out and carries a sample to an assay office. The visit earns him a silver and gold claim. By 1902 he has discovered oil in California. After a worker dies in an accident, Daniel adopts the man's orphaned son, H.W. He wants to pass as a family man when he courts investors.

  In 1911, a young man named Paul Sunday tells Daniel about an oil deposit in Little Boston. Daniel visits the Sundays' property and meets Paul's twin brother Eli, a preacher. Daniel pretends he wants the farm for hunting quail. Eli knows the land holds oil and questions his motives. Eli asks for $10,000 for his church, Daniel counters with $5,000, and they strike a deal. Daniel then acquires the land in and around the property. Only one holdout, William Bandy, keeps his ranch.

  Misfortune follows after Daniel breaks his promise to let Eli bless the well before drilling. One worker is killed. A gas blowout deafens H.W. and destroys the drilling infrastructure. When Eli publicly demands the money he is still owed, Daniel beats and humiliates him. Soon a man arrives claiming to be Daniel's half-brother, Henry. That night H.W. sets fire to their shack. Daniel chases and restrains the boy, then sends him to a school for the deaf in San Francisco.

  Standard Oil offers to buy out Daniel's local interests. He refuses and makes a deal with Union Oil to build a pipeline. Bandy's ranch still blocks the route.

  Daniel grows suspicious when Henry fails to recognize a childhood joke. He confronts the man one night at gunpoint. The man confesses that he knew the real Henry, who died of tuberculosis, and that he posed as Henry hoping for a job. Enraged, Daniel murders him and buries the body. The impostor's journal shows that the real Henry had been traveling to meet Daniel, and Daniel drinks and weeps. The next morning Bandy, who knows about the crime, offers an easement for the pipeline if Daniel publicly repents in Eli's church. At the baptism, Eli humiliates Daniel and coerces him into confessing that he abandoned his child. Later, while the pipeline is being built, H.W. reunites with Daniel, and Eli becomes a missionary.

  By 1927, H.W. is marrying Mary, the sister of Paul and Eli. Daniel is extremely wealthy, an alcoholic, and living alone in a large mansion. H.W. asks to dissolve their partnership so he can move to Mexico with Mary and start his own drilling company. Daniel mocks his son's deafness, reveals his true origins and disowns him. H.W. leaves after thanking God that he is not related to Daniel.

  Eli, now a radio preacher, visits Daniel in the bowling alley in his basement. He asks Daniel to partner with the church in drilling Bandy's property. Daniel agrees on one condition: Eli must denounce his faith. Once Eli does, Daniel reveals that he has already drained the property of its oil. He taunts Eli over the investments he lost when the market crashed. He also lies that he gave Eli's brother $10,000 instead, and that the brother is now wealthy. Then Daniel chases Eli around the alley and beats him to death with a bowling pin. When his butler comes to investigate, Daniel announces, "I'm finished."

  Critics have read this story as a statement about America. David Denby of The New Yorker wrote that the film is about "the driving force of capitalism as it both creates and destroys the future." James Christopher of The Times called it "a biblical parable about America's failure to square religion and greed." Reviewers who take the capitalism reading often point to Plainview's "I have a competition in me" speech. Plainview's origins lie in an older novel about the California oilfields.

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• 3. From Novel to Script

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  Eric Schlosser had just finished writing Fast Food Nation when reporters began comparing it to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Schlosser had never read Sinclair, so he started working through the author's books. That reading led him to the novel Oil!, which he found exciting and thought would make an excellent film. He sought out the Sinclair estate and bought the film rights in 2004. He hoped to find a director as passionate about the book as he was. Paul Thomas Anderson reached him first.

  Anderson was struggling with his own screenplay about two fighting families, and he had begun to see that it was not working. Homesick while in London, he bought a copy of Oil!, drawn to the cover illustration of a California oilfield. He contacted Schlosser and adapted the first 150 pages of the 1927 novel. Research trips to museums dedicated to early oilmen in Bakersfield shaped the script.

  After Anderson finished a first draft, Ghoulardi Film Company, Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films acquired the project. Money was still hard to find. Producer Joanne Sellar said the studios did not think the story had the scope of a major picture. It took two years to arrange financing, though Daniel Day-Lewis had joined the project almost immediately.

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• 4. The Milkshake Line

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  Albert Fall, a former Secretary of the Interior and U.S. Senator from New Mexico, is the man Anderson credited with the milkshake line. According to Anderson, Fall paraphrased it while speaking before a Congressional investigation into the Teapot Dome oil scandal of the 1920s. Anderson was fascinated to find a word like milkshake in the middle of official testimony and terminology. Fall had used it to explain the complicated process of oil drainage.

  In 2014, an independent attempt to locate the statement in Fall's testimony failed. An article in the Case Western Reserve Law Review suggested a different source. It pointed to remarks made in 2003 by Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico during a debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Domenici pictured a giant underground reservoir and a straw that could be curved and steered. His "milk shake" sits far away, while a sick child in a bedroom gobbles it up from the kitchen. Nobody has to carry the Mix Master that made the ice cream upstairs. Domenici finished with the point of the story: "This describes the actual drilling that is taking place."

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• 5. Casting Under Pressure

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  To build Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis started with the voice. Anderson sent him recordings dating from the late 19th century to 1927. He also sent a copy of the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, along with documentaries on its director, John Huston. Anderson counted Huston as an important influence. He said the film is about greed, ambition and paranoia, and about looking at the worst parts of yourself. While writing the script, he played it every night before bed. Day-Lewis also read letters from laborers, studied photographs of the period and read about the oil tycoon Edward Doheny.

  Anderson had written the screenplay with Day-Lewis in mind and approached him when the script was nearly complete. He had heard that Day-Lewis liked his earlier film Punch-Drunk Love, which gave him the confidence to hand over an unfinished copy. According to Day-Lewis, being asked was enough to convince him. He told The New York Observer that Anderson had entered the world of the story instead of observing it. Anderson had also filled it with characters who seemed to have lives of their own.

  For Plainview's "son," Anderson looked at actors in Los Angeles and New York City. He realized he needed someone from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and "live in that world." The filmmakers asked around at a school, and the principal recommended Dillon Freasier. They never had him read a scene. They simply talked with him and knew he was right.

  Paul Dano was first cast in the much smaller role of Paul Sunday, the brother who tips off Plainview about the oil. Anderson had seen Dano in The Ballad of Jack and Rose and imagined the part as a boy of 12 or 14. Two weeks into filming, Anderson replaced Kel O'Neill, the actor playing Eli Sunday, with Dano. A profile of Day-Lewis in The New York Times Magazine suggested that O'Neill was intimidated by Day-Lewis's intensity and his habit of staying in character on and off the set. Anderson, Day-Lewis and O'Neill all denied it. Day-Lewis said he did not believe that was the reason and hoped he was right. O'Neill blamed a poor working relationship with Anderson and his own diminished interest in acting.

  Dano had only four days to prepare. He researched the period and studied evangelical preachers. The earlier two weeks of scenes between Sunday and Plainview then had to be shot again with Dano in the role.

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• 6. Marfa, Mansion, Score

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  Principal photography began in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas, and ran for three months. Other location work took place in Los Angeles. The crew used Panavision XL 35 mm cameras, fitted mainly with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence, with most of the sets built on the ranch.

  The mansion interiors were filmed at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. The house was once the home of Edward Doheny Jr., a gift from his father, the oilman Edward Doheny. The production carefully renovated the basement's two-lane bowling alley. Anderson called it a particular situation, because the space was so narrow that only five or six people could stand behind the camera. Day-Lewis later broke a rib in a fall during filming. Anderson dedicated the finished film to Robert Altman, who died while it was being edited.

  The music came from a fan's instinct. Anderson loved Radiohead and had been impressed by Jonny Greenwood's score for the film Bodysong. While Anderson was writing the script, he heard Greenwood's orchestral piece "Popcorn Superhet Receiver," and it prompted him to ask Greenwood to collaborate. Greenwood agreed, then had doubts and thought about backing out. Anderson's reassurance and enthusiasm kept him on board. Anderson gave him a copy of the film. Three weeks later Greenwood returned with two hours of music recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.

  Greenwood told Entertainment Weekly that the aim was not simply to write period music, as a traditional score would. He hoped the traditional orchestral sounds would feel slightly unsettling, with a sinister undercurrent, even though every sound came from very old technology. The film also uses existing classical works. These include the third movement, "Vivace Non Troppo," of Johannes Brahms's Violin Concerto in D Major, and Arvo Pärt's "Fratres" for cello and piano. At the 58th Berlin International Film Festival in 2008, the score won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (music). In December 2008 it earned a Grammy nomination at the 51st Grammy Awards, in the category for Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

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• 7. Box Office and Critics

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  The first public screening took place on the 29th of September 2007 at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film opened in New York City and Los Angeles on the 26th of December 2007 and earned $190,739 over its opening weekend. On the 25th of January 2008, it expanded to 885 theaters in selected markets and took $4.8 million that weekend. It finished with $40.2 million in North America and $36 million elsewhere, for a worldwide total of $76.2 million. That was well above its $25 million budget. Even so, prints and advertising for the United States release cost about $40 million.

  The DVD arrived on the 8th of April 2008. An HD DVD edition was announced but canceled when the format was discontinued. The Blu-ray followed on the 3rd of June 2008.

  Critics were largely rapturous. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 91% approval rating from 245 reviews, with an average of 8.5 out of 10. Metacritic gives it a weighted average of 93 out of 100 from 42 critics, which it labels universal acclaim. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it above all a consummate work of art, whose pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. Glenn Kenny in Premiere praised the relentless focus of Day-Lewis's performance. Richard Schickel of Time called it "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made." Tom Charity of CNN described it as the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.

  Not everyone agreed. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that there was no need to pretend it was a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make one. He thought the scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano degenerated into "a ridiculous burlesque." Roger Ebert gave it three and a half out of four stars. He said it is the kind of film easily called great, but he was not sure of its greatness. He listed its unbending characters, its lack of women, its ending and its relentlessness, and saw its reach exceeding its grasp. That, he added, "is not a dishonorable thing."

  Carla Meyer of the Sacramento Bee gave the same star rating. She felt the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli was where the work "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie." In 2014, Peter Walker of The Guardian argued that the same scene was perhaps the one most inflated with its own self-importance. Months after his first review, LaSalle said he still did not consider the film a masterpiece. He wondered, though, whether its style, approach and attitude might become important in the future.

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• 8. Rankings and Awards

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  At the 80th Academy Awards, held on the 24th of February 2008, There Will Be Blood was nominated in eight categories. These included Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing. It won two. Day-Lewis took Best Actor, and Robert Elswit took Best Cinematography. The American Film Institute named it one of its ten movies of the year, and its jury predicted that Daniel Plainview would haunt film history for generations. Twenty critics placed it first on their 2007 top-ten lists.

  The decade ending in 2009 brought a bigger verdict. Metacritic compared more than 40 top-ten-of-the-decade lists from notable publications. There Will Be Blood was the most mentioned film, appearing on 46% of them and ranked first on five. In December 2009, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone named it the film of the decade. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly did the same. That month Gawker added up all the lists and declared the film the consensus choice, with "its straw in the whole damn cinema's milkshake." In February 2020, New York Magazine placed it among the best movies that lost Best Picture at the Oscars, alongside Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard.

  The century lists followed. In 2016, 177 film critics from around the world voted it third in the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century. In 2019, a panel of four Guardian journalists ranked it the best film of the 21st century. In 2021, members of the Writers Guild of America West and East ranked its screenplay 7th among the 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century. Filmmakers including Denis Villeneuve, Robert Eggers and Josh Safdie have cited it among the best of the century. In 2024, Quentin Tarantino named it one of the best films of the 21st century, although he criticized Dano's performance the following year.

  In June 2025, The New York Times ranked it third on its list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, and fourth on the readers' choice edition. One month later, in July 2025, Rolling Stone ranked it the best movie of the 21st century.

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